Digital Governance Lab

governance of technology and governance through technology

Class Five: Anonymity and the Right to be Forgotten

Review of Assigned Media + New Media (40 minutes)

For each quote, we plan on discussing it, placing it into its context, and understanding how it fits into the broader discussion about bias.

• John Oliver
  • if there is something bad about you on the internet, you can now ask google to take it down for you
    • My first question about this topic is that discussions about the law target search engines, all they do is index the internet and make it searchable. Who does the burden lie with?
    • Also, how does privacy factor into this? Most web hosting services have specific policies that prevent them from nsooping in on what their clients are doing with their servers. Any law would require those companies to monitor what people are doing on their servers. Also, the web is international. How do we prevent a website that is being hosted in sweden that violates US laws from reachign US users.
  • A man convicted of child pornography demanded that links to his crime are taken down
    • In this particular context, there is a public interest requirement. Links cannot be taken down if the public interest of them being up outweights them being taken down.
• GDPR
  • Critics of the GDPR call it the pop up law. It basicly requires that you check a box allowing data harvesting for specific purposes outlined in each companies agreement. These agreements are often difficult to read, long-winded, and unless you consent to tracking, services are often unusable. Does this render the bill ineffective?
  • Where personal data are processed for direct marketing purposes, the data subject shall have the right to object at any time to processing of personal data concerning him or her for such marketing, which includes profiling to the extent that it is related to such direct marketing. Where the data subject objects to processing for direct marketing purposes, the personal data shall no longer be processed for such purposes.
    • Can the company deny access to the service if customer doesn’t agree to the tracking?
    • Are there some vital services that must guarantee some tier of service to everyone?
• NPR
  • Something shouldn’t follow your for life.
    • If you were a drunk driver and killed several people due to your crime, after you have served your criminal sentence and re-paid your debt to society, should you be free from the stigma of having committed the original crime?
  • Accessiblity of information. More effort in the past and last anonymity today.
    • if you were divorced in the “old days”, it was public and kept in a record in a basement somewhere. In the modern world, it is much easier to access “public” information. Does how accessible the information that has always been public impact whether or not it is public?
  • This smacks of “censorship”.
    • Is this censorship?
  • It doesn’t actually work. It only blocks the article if you search the persons name with it.
    • Given that this doesn’t technically actually remove the link, is it a toothless law?
  • Infringes upon the rights of others to forget “true” information about you
  • What about privately made search engines?
    • So what if we all just made our own search engines. Does that render this law somewhat pointless?
  • 89% of users do not go to the second page of google. Could we just push bad results to the second page?
  • Individuals are not as bad as their worst deed. Institutions are not as good as their best press release.

Feedback (5 minutes)

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